Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2020 i Zoomer Magazine

HUMANS ARE TRULY two-faced creatures. Throughout history, masks have been adopted by various cultures for a variety of reasons. They’ve played a role in ceremonial rituals, battles, religion, entertainment, sports, fashion and in the medical and scientific communities. But never before has the world collectively adopted the mask for a single cause – the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19. Despite becoming a divisive issue, wearing a non-medical mask should be one of the tools in your arsenal in the battle to end this pandemic. The mask should be viewed as an extra layer of protection – since we’ve learned that some people are asymptomatic, wearing a mask in public limits the spread of infectious droplets and protects others. But face coverings alone are not enough. Stay the course…

IT TOOK LESS than half a year but the COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered almost everything we thought we knew about the economy. Government debt has ballooned, job losses have been catastrophic, once solid industries are failing and the outlook for recovery is unclear. Is there any way to make sense of this sudden and altogether bewildering transformation? Let’s hear from the influential players on how we got into this mess and, more importantly, how we’re going to get out of it. FISCAL AND DEMOCRATIC DEFICITS “The most expensive four hours in Canadian parliamentary history” That’s what some observers, including political scientist Christian Leuprecht, are calling the 240 minutes of time that the Liberal government allotted to debate and pass the COVID-19 emergency spending measures. Amounting to $150 billion,…

When all-American senior heartthrob Kevin Costner, 65, “opened up” to People magazine in June about how COVID-19 has brought him and wife Christine closer together, I felt bad. The idyllic picture he paints of celebrity domestic bliss under lockdown just seemed … braggy. After three-plus months of enforced togetherness, I fully admit I don’t always feel quite so cuddly about my own spouse in the endless day in and day out of it all. “Our partnership has really come into focus,” waxes Costner, a sage for our pandemic age, “about what we do for each other and how we deal with our family.” A Hallmark channel soundtrack must be swelling in the background: “Our house is like a river: You’ve just got to get into the flow of it,”…

OUR NATIONAL SPIRIT is embodied by our vast prairie lands and great lakes. And in our oceans from coast to coast to coast and the jagged mountains that climb high, daring to touch the sky with their snow-white peaks. About 100 years ago, a collective of seven artists decided to document it all. Thick oil paints so rich with intensity – boreal greens, snowcap whites, lake blues and fiery oranges coming to life on canvas. The Group of Seven has a birthday this year, celebrated in Like a Vision: the Group of Seven at 100, now on at the McMichael Art Gallery in Kleinburg, Ont., from which the paintings on these pages come to us. Ice as smooth as glass, with just a hint of blue hue cool emanating from…

“THE ART FORM we love is in crisis.” So begins a joint statement from the Toronto International, New York, Telluride and Venice film fests, all pledging to forgo their annual September rivalry to share ideas and offer “a united platform.” The move comes after COVID-19 ground the film industry to a standstill and acknowledges that, in times of crisis, movies can still “enchant, inform, provoke and heal.” And though it would have been nice for TIFF to pledge unity with smaller Canadian festivals as well – like September’s Vancouver, Calgary and Atlantic international film fests – artistic director and co-head Cameron Bailey said in a separate statement that the 2020 fest has “responded by going back to our original inspiration – to bring the very best in film to…

IN JUNE, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a new mobile contact tracing app that will alert you if you’ve been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. The app, called COVID Alert and made in Canada, was (at press time) scheduled to launch in mid-July. This exposure-detecting technology should help public health agencies track the spread of the disease and thereby manage it more effectively. However, it’s also raising privacy concerns that the data it collects will reside on the servers of big tech companies. “It will be up to individual Canadians to decide whether to download the app or not, but the app will be most effective when as many people as possible have it,” said Trudeau, announcing the federal government’s endorsement of a product…

 It was as much an end of an era as it was millennium. Conjuring up ghosts of a 2000 New Year’s Eve spent in the Dominican Republic lair of the late Oscar de la Renta, Barbara Amiel remembers how glamorous and how “cock-a-hoop” she felt then, amidst all the many one-name supernovas of the Manhattan ilk (women atop a fading old guard): his wife, Annette; Nancy Kissinger; Mercedes Bass; Jayne Wrightsman; the other Barbara, Walters – “all tarted in our long gowns, and the glittering paste tiaras that had decorated our dinner plates.” Turning to her husband, Conrad Black, that night – both of them then at the Edmund Hillary summit of society (he the international press baron with a far-flung empire that included London’s Daily Telegraph, The Jerusalem…

IN TORONTO, THE MOTHER OF 29-YEAR-OLD Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who had Black, Indigenous and Ukrainian heritage, called police for help with a family conflict two days after George Floyd’s May 25 murder in Minneapolis, Minn. The officers went into the apartment and, from the hallway, she heard Regis calling, “Mom, help,” before she fell to her death from the 24th-floor balcony. In Kinngait, Nunavut, a bystander recorded a video on June 1 of an RCMP officer dooring an allegedly inebriated Inuk man as he drove up to him, knocking him to the ground. Since the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December, anti-Asian hate crimes have been on the rise across the country, and Vancouver police were investigating 29 cases by the end of May,…

“I’M NOT JUST the president but I’m also a client.” Many of us will recall those words spoken by Sy Sperling, the owner-member of Hair Club for Men, in one of his TV advertisements while holding up a photo of his previously bald pate. Sperling, who passed away earlier this year, was key in bringing the conversation of hair loss to the fore. For women, the conversation has been around since birth – giving birth, that is. Many experience a significant amount of hair loss during pregnancy, with the psychological side effect of a lower self-esteem and the physical of it sometimes never growing back. But with the tricks of the trade – think extensions, falls, wigs, biotin pills and a bathroom cupboard stocked with thickening creams, volumizing mousses and…

■ THE CASE An 82-year-old man is brought into the ER by ambulance on a backboard with a hard collar on (used to protect the cervical spine in the case of trauma after a fall). He lives with his wife and is normally independent but has fallen three times in the past week. ■ THE SYMPTOMS He didn’t seem to sustain injury the first two times. But the third time, he could not get up due to a pain in his chest when he moved. On examination, he is alert but disoriented as to date and place. He is a bit restless. His vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate and temperature) are normal. ■ THE TESTS The trauma examination consists of primary and secondary examinations. During…

Every day, Darrell Fox opens the journal that travelled every mile of the Marathon of Hope and reads the corresponding entry handwritten 40 years ago by his brother, Terry Fox. It began on April 12, 1980, in St. John’s, but the passage that gets him is from South Brook Junction, N.L., on April 27 – Day 15 and 542 kilometres into the run. “Today we got up at 4:00 a.m. As usual, it was tough. If I died, I would die happy because I was doing what I wanted to do. How many people could say that? I want to set an example that will never be forgotten. It is courage and not foolishness. It isn’t a waste.” Darrell wasn’t there that day because he didn’t join Terry and his…

Vikram Vij is a Vancouver chef, author and television personality. > What’s the best book you’ve read this year and why? The book is called Flame, and it is the story of a woman named Shahnaz Husain, who built an empire of beauty salons in India. She is the flame: through all the storms life brought her, not one could douse her spark of free spirit. > What book can’t you wait to dive into? I want to read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts again. It is such a fun read, and I love the incredibly vivid portrait it paints of Bombay. > What’s your favourite book of all time? Without a shadow of a doubt, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. > What book completely changed your perspective? You might think an autobiography…

“The tomato offers its gift of fiery colour and cool completeness”—PABLO NERUDA, CHILEAN NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING POET (1904-1973) “The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure … a tomato, an adventure”—MURIEL BARBERY, FRENCH NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER (1969-) You say tomato, and I say tomahto. Or pomme d’amour, as the French might say, because of the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of the fruit’s seeds. Or pomo d’oro, as the Italians might say, referencing a specific tomato that is golden yellow at its peak of ripeness. But don’t call the whole thing off. At this time of year, the love apples are on the vine, the golden apples ready to be…

ACROSS BRAIN GAMES #73 Who’s in the Mix? 1 Orgs. and assns. 5 Beach Boys’ “fun fun fun” ride 10 Watercolour water colour 14 Olfactory offence 15 Half of a Muppet duo 16 Corner Gas café The ___ 17 One challenging singer Lavigne? 19 Staff carried by the Sergeant-at-Arms 20 Meet unexpectedly 21 Actor Burt in a lion suit, 1939 23 ___ Tranquility (lunar basin) 24 Cheese named for its Quebec origin 26 Small-sounding Greek letters 29 “Dragon” Dickinson after going on a diet? 32 Until the due date 35 Van. sch. whose mascot is McFogg the Dog 36 Our planet, to Kepler 37 Kick backtime, for short 38 Pedi place 40 Speedy plane of old: Abbr. 42 Kamloops sch. whose mascot is Wolfie 43 Singers Winehouse and Grant…